Rubbery material self-repairs when snapped

A self-healing synthetic rubber could spell the end of holes in the soles of your shoes. “You can feel the material mending itself when you hold the fractured sides together,” says Ludwik Leibler, a chemist at the Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution (ESPCI) in Paris, France. “It’s a strange feeling.”

His team has created a type of rubber that melds together again when broken ends are pinched together. The mended rubber has all the strength of the original. It could make repairing car fan belts, rubber bands and punctured rubber goods like kitchen gloves a cinch, Leibler says. It might result in strange new products, too, such as bags that completely seal up and need ripping open to retrieve the contents. “You don’t need a zip when you can make a resealable hole in it,” Leibler says.

His team reveal how their self-healing rubber works in this week’s

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